Indications of fraud in the June 12 Iranian presidential election, together with large-scale street demonstrations, have
led to claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not actually win the election, and that the majority of Iranians perceive
their government as illegitimate and favor regime change.
An analysis of multiple polls of the Iranian public from three different sources finds little evidence to support such
conclusions.
The analysis conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland (PIPA), was based
on:
• a series of 10 recently-released polls conducted by the University of Tehran; eight conducted in the month before the
June 12 election and two conducted in the month after the election, based on telephone interviews conducted within Iran
• a poll by GlobeScan conducted shortly after the election, based on telephone interviews conducted within Iran
• a poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org (managed by PIPA) conducted August 27--September 10, based on telephone interviews
made by calling into Iran
The study sought to address the widely-discussed hypotheses that Ahmadinejad did not win the June 12 election and that
the Iranian people perceive their government as illegitimate. It also sought to explore the assumption that the
opposition represents a movement favoring a substantially different posture toward the United States. The analysis of
the data found little evidence to support any of these hypotheses.
Steven Kull, director of PIPA, said, "Our analysis suggests that it would not be prudent to base US policy on the
assumption that the Iranian public is in a pre-revolutionary state of mind."
ENDS